Art On The Blockchain (AOTB) Episode 16: Ethereal Summit NYC

There’s a fringe technology that’s bringing creatives together in very interesting ways, and it’s called cryptocurrency. Most people gloss over this facet of creative programming when discussing crypto because it isn’t fintech, it isn’t for getting rich quick, and it might just seem “too weird.” Luckily, The AOTB Podcast is dedicated to covering this artistic side in detail, and in this episode they do it live from the Ethereal Summit in NYC. Take a listen below.

Exploring the Ineffable Mysteries of Ether Land

If you’re not up on your AOTB listening, the hosts of the show are a crack team of creatives and staunch crypto-art advocates dedicated to covering developments in the space. DJ J $crilla is a musician and crypto art enthusiast, and his counterpart, Cynthia Gayton, is a lawyer specializing in art and contract law.

Money Gets Covered, Not the Art

One of the interesting discussions by the duo is the media’s obsession with the numbers at auction over everything else in crypto-art. No one’s talking with the artists, featuring their work, or exploring the new techniques and projects being employed to make crypto-art possible. Most of the coverage of Ethereal dealt with its Cryptokitties auction, it seems.

In contrast, AOTB’s coverage of the Rare DC art auction and other events leading to Ethereal amounted to real artist and developer showcases and meaningful analysis of the underlying culture of makers and creatives making crypto-art happen around the United States.

AI Writes Rap

Of the many facets of this AOTB episode, perhaps one of the most interesting is that the intro was generated by a machine learning AI. Advances in the field have made prediciton models that can “rap” to viable music, and the multidisciplinary nature of the crypto-art community has brought this open research field into reality in a big way.

The architects of the bot, Moises Sanabria, Eddie Negron, and Manuel Palou, are part of a Miami-based collective called Art404 that focuses on emerging tech.

Art404 with the AOTB Crew

Digital Art, In Meatspace

One of the most pervasive criticisms of the emerging digital and crypto-art scenes is that there’s no value in possessing them because they don’t exist in physical space, and they can be copied freely. Poppy Simpson, Head of Curation for Meural, thinks there’s a solution for this problem.